Asylum (3 page)

“There’s no need for that,” snapped Desrocher. “We can handle the situation
entre nous
—among ourselves. There is no reason to think that there is any involvement off the island.”

“There have been four deaths,” Richard, next to me, pointed out. He wasn’t too happy about the director’s dressing-down, either. “It doesn’t sound like you’re handling it.”

“Enough!” An aide was whispering into the mayor’s ear, and he held up his hand. “We will reconvene tomorrow afternoon. Madame LeDuc, I want a report from you on my desk in the morning. Now for God’s sake,
tout le monde,
go and find out what’s happening out there!”

*   *   *

Chantal sat at her desk in the outer office and watched Richard and me coming through the door. She summed up the situation with immediate accuracy. “Everyone’s blaming everyone else,” she said.

“That’s about it,” agreed Richard, slumping into the chair next to her desk. “Everything short of name-calling.”

“There was name-calling,” I said, standing in front of the desk and leafing through yet more pink message slips. “They were just trying to be subtle about it. This goes on, it will get more blatant, you wait and see.”

“Something to look forward to,” said Richard.

I looked at him sharply. “Are you all right?” He looked the same as he always did: very Gallic, elegantly dressed today in an Armani suit that he’d no doubt picked up secondhand—I knew what his city salary was—but managed to make it look perfect anyway. His compelling blue eyes and tousled dark hair made women turn around and look at him, more than once, more often than not. After working together for three years, I’d started to get used to it.

He gave a very French shrug, then delivered the bombshell. “I knew her.”

There was a moment of silence. I didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. I walked over to my door and opened it. “In my office. Now.”

I didn’t sit behind my desk; I don’t need to assert my authority with Richard. I gestured him to the leather-covered sofa under the diplomas and sat in the matching adjacent armchair. I leaned forward, bridging the distance between us. “Talk to me.”

He ran a hand through his hair again distractedly. “Danielle Leroux,” he said unnecessarily. “I know her. I knew her.” He paused, then said, explosively, “
Merde, alors!”
and buried his head in his hands.

I waited a moment, then reached out a hand and touched his shoulder, keeping it there. “Richard.
Je suis desolée
.” I am so sorry. What an inadequate thing to say, in the circumstances.

He looked up, tears in his eyes. “It’s just…” He took a long, shuddering breath. “Martine, there may be problems. I’m sorry, but there may be. We—we were seeing each other.”

Oh, God. I tried not to let my consternation show; it wouldn’t help anything. I kept my hand on his shoulder reassuringly. “I think you should tell me about it, Richard.”

He nodded miserably, but didn’t speak again for an eternity. “Danielle … she was a research librarian. Over at UQAM.” That explained how they met; Richard was working part-time on a graduate degree at the Université du Québec à Montréal, my own alma mater. “She … at first, we went out for a coffee a couple of times, we liked each other, what can I say? We spent a lot of time together. We took a long weekend, went up into the Laurentians…”

I remembered him taking that time off; I’d had to change my own personal plans to accommodate him, and Ivan hadn’t been best pleased. That had been at least a month ago. If Richard had met Danielle when classes were still in session, they had been seeing each other throughout the summer.

My stomach clenched with anxiety. Most people are killed by someone they know. Despite the profile pointing to this being a serial killer, there was no way that my deputy wasn’t going to be on the list of suspects.

Pretty high up on it, too.

I took a deep breath. “Richard. When did you see her last?”

There was misery in his eyes. “Wednesday night.”

Great. And she’d been killed sometime Thursday. It was going to be a very long day indeed.

All of us at the orphanage had one thing, one terribly important thing, in common: we were mistakes. I never really understood what that meant, but Sister said it often enough that I knew it must be true. We came from villages, farms, even the city itself; we were brought with favorite toys or blankets or in harsh cheap unraveling baskets or by some relative who hid us from the light of day.

Those who brought us in were fed the lies. Of course he can keep his favorite blanket.
Naturellement
, she will have her stuffed rabbit with her in bed at night.
Bien sûr
there will be a good education. We love them all as though they were our own.

Well, we were theirs, all right; but love didn’t have anything to do with it.

It was all about the work. Hard work.

Even the smallest children had something to do. My earliest memories of the orphanage are of floors, of scrubbing floors. Perhaps because we were small and couldn’t reach much of anything else, we were made to clean the floors.

I don’t know if the sisters even knew our names, or if they ever cared about any of us as individuals. We were their charges, the mistakes that they were tasked to deal with. And that was what united us: the need to be children, real children, with names and pasts and thoughts that were all our own.

Not that they didn’t try to hammer the individuality out of us. We looked the same, all of us girls, wearing long scratchy shifts in bed at night and pinafores during the day—we all wore the same clothes, interchangeably; nothing was our own. Nothing showed that one of us was in any way different from any other one.

In the winter we washed in water so cold that we had to break the ice on it, we got dressed and made our beds, lined two-deep the length of the dormitory. Sister inspected all the beds and had a stick ready to rap the knuckles of any child who didn’t do it properly.

Needless to say, I got quite good at making my bed.

Then we’d stand in line, single file, down three sets of stairs and out to the chapel for morning mass, which none of us understood on account of it being in Latin, but which we had to stay awake for anyway. I got good at staying awake and attentive there, too.

We had no idea, then, that it could get better—or worse. It was the way our lives were. It was everything we knew. It just was.

CHAPTER THREE

As soon as Richard left, I got on the phone. “I need to come over there now,” I told the director’s assistant.

“Madame LeDuc, we have you scheduled in for your update at two o’clock,” she said smoothly. “I’m afraid
monsieur le directeur
is busy at present.”

“Then he will have to be interrupted,” I said. “I have information about the most recent homicide, and I need to speak with him at once.”

“
Madame
—”

“Never mind,” I interrupted. “It doesn’t matter. I’m on my way over.”

I opened the small office closet and exchanged heels for flats. Never mind whether or not they went with my suit: comfort will always win out in my book. Life is too short.

Chantal tapped on the door and put her head in. “Monsieur Petrinko is on line two,” she said cheerfully.

I picked it up. “Ivan, I haven’t much time—”

“Hi, babe. I’ll be quick.”

I relented, told myself to back off, and drew in a deep breath. It wasn’t Ivan’s fault that everything else in Montréal seemed to be falling apart. “Sorry, sweetheart. What’s up?”

“Just a minor domestic emergency,” he said. “Margery has to be in the hospital. Well, she’s there now, actually. Down in Boston. Gall bladder, or something like that. Something really serious.” Ivan gets a little flustered sometimes.

I grimaced. Margery is Ivan’s former wife and the mother of his children. Any sentence that begins with her name inevitably ends in something somewhere between inconvenience and disaster. It isn’t Margery’s fault, it’s just the nature of shared parenting. “And?”

“And the kids are already on their way to Montréal,” Ivan said. “Some neighbor dropped them off at Logan, and their flight will be in—oh, hell, in about half an hour. And I have this meeting—”

“No,” I interrupted. “I can’t go pick them up at the airport.”

There was a pause. “Martine, I wouldn’t ask if this wasn’t an important meeting. You know that.”

“I know that,” I agreed, trying to reach across the room for my briefcase and not disconnect the line in doing so. “And you know that I wouldn’t say no unless
this
was really important. I’m on my way to police headquarters. I
seriously
don’t have time.”

There was a longer pause. “We’re going to have to have them for the weekend anyway, babe, and I’m sorry,” Ivan said, exploring my mood. “I can’t send them back to Boston, not with all this going on with their mom. I don’t want to ask Rob to deal with them, with everything else on his plate.” Rob was Margery’s husband. I didn’t know him well enough to pick him out in a crowd, but he seemed to make her happy, and the kids liked him. “He’s probably at the hospital with her now, anyway. I think she’s at Mass. General.”

Wherever she was being treated couldn’t figure into my plans. “Ivan, I have to go,” I said.

“Okay, okay, I’ll manage to get them. Or I’ll send somebody from here. Maybe Sylvie.” He was thinking out loud. “But—well, I thought you should know that they’ll be staying with us for a few days. At least through Sunday night. Sorry, I know it’s not our weekend to have them here, but I couldn’t say no.”

He was repeating himself, which meant he was nervous. It gave me pause. Was I really that awful, that he needed to feel me out that much? But … yeah, extra time with the kids wasn’t exactly the way I’d planned on spending the weekend.

I shouldn’t really say that. It’s not so much that I don’t like them—in unguarded moments I’ll even admit to loving them—it’s the fact of giving up our only free time together, of constructing a weekend that centered around Claudia and Lukas. Normally there would have been a conversation here about it. Today, not so much. “Of course you couldn’t,” I said. “I get it, I really do. But listen, Ivan, I really have to run. I’ll see you later. We’ll figure out the weekend then.” I disconnected the call before he could say anything else.

It was time to concentrate on the easier of my two jobs, that of publicity director. The stepmother thing? Sometimes I felt like I’d never get a handle on it.

Let’s face it: everyone’s got their own ideas about how children should be raised, but try getting four adults who don’t necessarily like each other attempting to co-parent together, each with their own past and thoughts on the subject, and it isn’t pretty.

After staring uselessly at the phone sitting in its cradle, I roused myself and headed across town to the Plateau, where the headquarters of the SPVM lives on the Rue St.-Urbain. Twenty minutes via Métro: a new personal best.

I had barely arrived at François Desrocher’s office before he started in on me. “Beside Mademoiselle Leroux’s telephone is a pad of paper. On that pad of paper is the number of your deputy,” he said accusingly, fixing me with a sharp look.

“I know,” I said calmly. “He was dating Danielle. However, he did not see her at all yesterday, and so can be of limited help to you.”

“You knew this?”

“Not when we met this morning,” I said. “He told me of it after the meeting. Monsieur Rousseau is devastated, as you might well imagine,
monsieur le directeur
. We have spoken of it since then, he and I.”

“You were
unaware
of their connection before?”

It was my turn to glare. Wasn’t that what I’d just said? “I am not in the habit of inquiring into my staff’s personal lives,
monsieur
,” I said tartly. “Monsieur Rousseau is an excellent deputy director. His job performance has always and consistently been exceptional. Beyond that, what he does in his personal life is none of my affair.”

He ignored me. “We need to question your assistant,” he said, his voice brisk, making sure he was showing who was in charge here. “He should be relieved of any further involvement in this case.”

“He
has
no involvement in this case,” I said with as much patience as I could manage, wondering how many years of prison I’d get for decking the director. A lot, probably. Though mitigated by his attitude and behavior, surely, as anyone who knew him would have to concede. “It is not my office that’s doing the investigating, as you know,
monsieur
: that is your task. I am merely to assist you in any way I can, and to report back to
monsieur le maire
. As was made clear at this morning’s meeting. My deputy will continue to assist
me
as necessary.” I took a deep breath. “You may, of course, speak with him in order to gather information about the victim, as you would with any other witness. He has assured me that he will make himself available to the police.”

He frowned, making a show of sitting back in his chair, steepling his fingers, regarding me with disfavor. “Madame LeDuc, I would not wish to interfere.” Yeah, right. “But you must understand that I have a police force to run and a series of murders to investigate. Your deputy will no doubt be summoned.”

Hadn’t I just
said
that he could interview Richard? If he was trying to make a point about being in charge, he could have just said so. It was time to take the offensive here. “In the meantime,” I said, as sweetly as I could manage, “perhaps, as I am here already,
monsieur
will give me an update on the current progress of the investigation? Perhaps bring me up to speed on whatever evidence you’ve gathered, on what leads your detectives are pursuing at the moment?”

He didn’t like it, but he already knew this wasn’t a battle he was going to win. He made a show of sighing and of unlocking a drawer in his desk before withdrawing a folder and passing it across the expanse of desk to me.